Many households have pets that are routinely fed in or near human living spaces. This may insure that their food intake can be monitored by their owners and also that they remain reasonably safe from dangerous conditions associated with hunting and foraging for their meals. Thus for example, many dogs and cats may be fed various dry and wet foods from bowls placed on the floor of a kitchen or other convenient room in the pet owner's house. Some pets are fed on porches just outside of a pet owner's home, or even in an owner's back yard. In any case, pet food and any residue and remnants thereof may attract scavenging pests, such as flies, ants, and other insects and bugs.
Scavenging flies, insects, and bugs may not just become a nuisance to pets and pet owners who might be afraid of or annoyed by the presence of such pests, but they may also contaminate the pet food and cause illness by spreading foodborne bacteria and disease.
Some proposals for preventing contamination of exposed pet food include, for example, bowls configured to automatically deposit food into such bowls at a particular time. It is contemplated that such configurations prevent food from being exposed for prolonged periods of time, minimizing the chance for insects and bugs to become attracted to scents associated with the food. However, some pets are apt to graze rather than eat all of their food in a single sitting. Timely deposited food for grazing pets, then, may still be exposed and attractive to pests over prolonged periods. Even when pets do eat deposited food in a single sitting, any residue and crumbs leftover from the meal may remain exposed to attract various bugs and insects. Thus, another proposal has been to provide lidded pet feeders. Though this solution may physically obscure foodstuff from direct contact by bothersome pests, this solution likewise prevents animals apt to graze from eating whenever they please because their food is obscured by a lid.
Some other proposals have included various means configured to trap and/or terminate insects attracted to pet food. For instance, U.S. Pat. No. 4,802,302 to Alnafissa discloses a pet food dish comprising sticky adhesive strips scented to attract crawling insects fastened circumferentially to an outside of a base of the pet food dish. This, however, is deficient, because removal of the adhesive strips with trapped insects may be a difficult endeavor for those who are disgusted by flies and insects. Another proposal is U.S. Pat. No. 6,065,428 to Fronk which teaches a pet dish having a pedestal configured to space apart a top and bottom portion of a pet dish, with a strip of repellant insecticide disposed in such space. This proposal is deficient, though, because it fails to address the problem of flying insects which may also pose contamination threats and nuisance. U.S. Pub. No. 2006/0242891 filed by Marshall teaches a container configured to kill, repel, or trap insects attracted to the contents of the container. This proposal, however, also fails to prevent flying insects from accessing exposed foodstuffs.
Thus, there remains a need for a pet feeder configured to trap undesirable pests such as insects and bugs attracted to pet food contained therein and that is also configured to prevent contamination of such pet food.